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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
 Posted - 02/10/2007 : 09:33:44
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I came across this small article (as you do, or at least as I do) about the 4AD band Colourbox, and I'm tempted to check them out. I've only ever heard their collaboration with M/A/R/R/S, Pump Up The Volume. Apparently, they only had one album. I'm tempted to not type this up, what with the slaggings I've gotten lately, but that would be petty:
http://stylusmagazine.com/stypod/archives/637
Colourbox
February 9, 2007
By the mid-‘80s, label 4AD was a worldbeat away from becoming an anthropology class. Texture junkies and genre hoppers became the label touchstone, developing a diaphanous sound of Blade Runner atmospherics and zeitgeisty new wave. Ren faire freaks Dead Can Dance and psychobabblers the Cocteau Twins were the label’s vanguard acts, providing the label with its unique aesthetic (later succeeded by alt-rock ubiquities the Pixies). But rather than revisit the shrines of 4AD’s heavyweights, let me pick up the criminally overlooked torch and praise Colourbox.
Working with pop as their canvas, Colourbox’s Martyn and Steve Young spent way too long tooling with a few singles before recruiting vocalist Lorita Grahame in 1983, and recorded their self-titled debut two years later. Per 4AD’s usual eccentricities, Colourbox splits its eggs between several baskets. The first four tracks alone go from ethereal piano nocturne, to schizophrenic gunslinger pop, Jamaican dub, and hefty soul balladry. Far from fickle, Colourbox essentially reinvented the wheel—pop music—with synths and samples, carefully wrapping new genre twists into every track and pulling it off.
Eerie synth howls introduce “The Moon Is Blue,” Colourbox’s stab at some kind of industrial R&B. Grahame does away with the eighties’ de facto pop vocals—perpetual vibrato, elevator octaves—and, instead, channels a jolting performance worthy of Grace Jones. Seemlessly blending the sensibilities of Holland/Dozier/Holland and the Youngs’ brooding arrangement, “Moon” revels in its pulpy, dystopian synths but never loses its pop footing.
More in the vein of their labelmates, “Just Give ‘Em Whiskey” is a thrilling jaunt through razor guitars and found sounds, landing somewhere between the Jesus & Mary Chain and Nick at Nite. The track proves the perfect showcase for Colourbox’s fearless sampling which is packed neatly between manic everything: stamping synths, robot manifestos, and a ‘phetamined drum machine (if Manny Phresh grew up in the Village). Though not the first to bring sampling into a rock context—krautrockers Can and ne’er do wells Negativland did it years earlier—Colourbox’s compulsive sampling would prove to be infinitely more influential. The Youngs’ participation in the seminal one-off group M/A/R/R/S, an almost disastrous collaboration with labelmates AR Kane, spawned the mother of all jock jams “Pump Up the Volume,” which went to #1 in the UK and proved the tipping point for sampling outside of hip-hop. Even after the track’s unprecedented success, Colourbox disappeared from the music industry, leaving behind one incredible album and haunting listeners for years to come with the specters of Ibiza techno. |
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Colourbox.
